The J2EE Tutorial

[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s : Stephanie Bodoff, Dale Green, Kim Haase et al.
Publisher : Addison-Wesley
Category : J2EE and Distributed Computing
Review by : David Vick
Rating : 7 horseshoes</pre>
As part of Sun's �The Java Series� this book has the same content as you can find online. Why buy a book you can get for free? Convenience!! You can take it anywhere and read it anytime.
The content of the book is thorough and covers the uses of the various J2EE parts in depth. The book excels above other Enterprise books in describing the deployment process and how the different J2EE concepts all work together.
The authors give very detailed, step by step, instructions on how to use the deploy tool to create the various deployment files (WARs, JARs, etc.)
The book references a complete sample project (on the CD) that makes it easier to understand concepts and how they all tie together. As opposed to other books that use separate examples for each topic and never show the technologies together. The only noticeable lack in the tutorial is the code samples presented are usually snippets and can not be used alone to practice and play with.
At times the flow of the book was hard to follow and only after reading part of a chapter or section did I understand the direction. This may be a result of having multiple authors.
Readers can get the most use out of the book in learning the details of the deployment process along with other related concepts and steps. You won�t find useful code samples to play and experiment with but, those can be found in most other books.
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[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s : Eric Jendrock , et al
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category : J2EE
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating : 6 horseshoes</pre>
"The Java EE 5 Tutorial" is the official tutorial covering all the Java EE technologies.

"As part of Sun's 'The Java Series' this book has the same content as you can find online. Why buy a book you can get for free? Convenience!! You can take it anywhere and read it anytime." - Dave Vick - JavaRanch Review of the J2EE 1.4 version of this book. They eliminated the best part of a hardcopy! At 1300 pages, The Java EE 5 book is too heavy to carry around conveniently. (the 1.4 edition was less than 600 pages) I think it is time to split this book into two volumes. Maybe right after the 500 pages on the front end.

Other things I disliked:
It wasn't clear what was new in Java EE 5.
As in past editions, it reads better online than printed.
There are extensive forward references and lots of repetition. For example, chapter 16 repeats the six steps to open a NetBeans project 12 times!
Many examples didn't explain how/why to do something? like whether to call a web service directly from a JSP.
Most examples used Java 5 syntax inconsistently. It looked like Sun recommends using generics for collections, but precious little else from Java 5.

There were good diagrams and charts and good case studies along with several excellent chapters. Overall, I would say to read the pieces you are interested in online and spend your money on a different book.


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